Summer 2007 (31 page)

“See it glimmering?” Jack Yap asked his brother.
Pudding, who didn’t care for eggs unless they were dripping down his boots,
stared up at the sky. The expression on his face was unreadable, perhaps vacant.
Pudding could look at the sun for hours and not blink. He cast a shadow as long
as an oak tree. Jack Yap stepped into the Pudding-cut shade, and the egg in his
hands blazed.

And he saw inside.

He saw inside the skinchanger’s egg.

A shadow, a flame, a dark heart beating.

It shifted, it melted, it took a new shape.

A fish, a snake, a bird, a child.

A child. A human child. A girl child, sleeping in a pool
of her own black hair, her skin of bright red gold. She blinked sleepily and
seemed, to Jack Yap, to see right into him. One eye of ebony, one of fire.
Black lips sucking on a flaming thumb, round limbs bundled to her belly,
although a restless fist or foot sometimes jabbed out, distending the oval egg,
making it jump and pulse.

Like holding a thunderstorm, thought Jack Yap. Like
holding lightning before it is born.

And inside him, all his urge to shake the egg had died.
If he knew how, he would have wept right then. He might have learned to cry at
last, at that very moment, in those very hills, might have opened up and bawled
like the lonesomest hound all for the beauty of that little changeling asleep
in her egg. So he might have done–if, that is, the egg’s skinchanger
mother hadn’t come along right then, stalking on tiger’s legs, with the tail of
a scorpion, the head of a buffalo, and the eyes of a madwoman.

The skinchanger saw Jack Yap. She saw her egg. She threw
back her head and yowled. Tiger, buffalo, madwoman all went into that yowl, and
if Jack Yap had been a different sort of boy, he would have dropped the egg and
set off running.

But Jack Yap, being his mother’s son, merely tucked the
egg under his arm and stepped back, beside his brother Pudding.

“Stomp,” he said. “Stomp it dead.”

And Pudding did.

#

Later, as Pudding was rinsing the blood off his stone
shoes in the stream, Jack Yap sighed.

“What’s she need, you think?” he asked. “I mean, she
wasn’t in a nest or anything, just sitting out there between boulders. Does she
need cold then? Fresh air? Rock? At home, we’ll keep her in one of your boots,
Puds. That should do it. And then when she hatches, what’ll we feed her?
Skinchangers’re nasty devils.” He caressed the egg, fond and proud. The scars
on his mouth pulled lividly at his smile. “Blood-drinkers, soul-suckers, eaters
of road-kill and seducers of men: that’s how she’ll grow, the pretty wee lady.
Ain’t enough folk around these parts to slake her. Have to take her to the
city, won’t we? And what’ll Marm say, I wonder?” Jack Yap snickered to himself.
“’Course, we could always feed her Marm first.”

For the first time since Jack Yap had started babbling,
Pudding glanced up from his streambed and grinned. It could have been the
sunset that night, but his tiny teeth looked a little red, like he’d been
chewing on soft strawberries. Jack Yap clucked, in close mockery of horror.

“Puds, you great stomach! You didn’t?”

Pudding murred.

“That skinchanger you stomped probably had the walking
rabies. And you went and et her raw, didn’t you? I swear, Puds, do I have to
watch you every minute?”

Pudding licked his lips. Jack Yap’s shoulders, sharp as
garden shears, shook with silent laughter. Jack Yap never laughed out loud.

“Still hungry, eh?” he asked. “Well, no wonders there.
That skinchanger was naught but bones and a few scraps of magic. I’ve a bear trap
in my own belly, truth be told. Look at the sky! We orter be gettin’ home-side
anyway. Eggs for you and gruel for me, King Pudding. Ah, ’tis the high life we
lead.”

Nevertheless, he tucked the egg amiably enough under his
shirt (the bulge of it making him look either a very pregnant boy or one with
an advanced tumor), turned his long nose for home, and taking his brother by
the huge, soft hand, led him out of the hills again. The ground trembled where
they walked.

#

Marm was ever so, ever so pleased to see them.

She was standing in the doorway. She had a birch switch
in one hand and a rusty old chain slung over one shoulder. She had her fists on
her hips and her hair in a knot, where it blazed like ragged sugar maples in
October. She was smiling.

“Knew I’d catch you out this day or that,” she said, “if
I left you to your wiles. Oh, Jackie lad.” She raised her switch. Jack Yap
turned his back, hunching to protect the egg. “Waltz into the hills, do you?”
THWACK! “Encourage your poor brother!” THWACK! “Abandon my poor chickens!”
THWACK! THWACK! THWACK! “And for what, Jackie? To defy me? Why must you defy
me? I do well enough by you. I keep you in leggings and gruel!”

It was just cold enough, and Jack Yap just thin enough,
that the skin of his back broke easily under her onslaught and began to bleed
through his shirt. He tucked his chin and gritted his teeth, even as his
ravaged mouth curled into its customary smile. Pudding, uneasy, sank to a
crouch and started mewling. Jack Yap unscrewed his scowl for a half second to
give him a little wink.

“Easy, Puds!” he gasped. “Just a tickle.”

Marm stopped switching him.

“Get your brother out of those shoes,” she said, her
voice so brittle it was like to snap. “Much good they do him now. Then go to
bed. No supper for you, my naughty lads! I ought instead to feed your eyes to
my chickens!”

She flounced her fancy skirts (fancier by far, anyway,
than a lady with a dilapidated cottage, two growing sons, a chicken coop, an
outhouse and a vegetable garden ought to be wearing) and moved to make her
regal exit of the yard. But a secret glimmering from the corner of her eye
stayed her. What she saw, alas, alack-the-day, was the skinchanger’s egg being
slipped from Jack Yap’s shirt into the bucket of Pudding’s great stone boot.

“Jackie boy,” she said sweetly.

Jack Yap froze, blood ribbons unwinding down his back.

“What is that, lad? What pretty pebble did you find out
there, my precious son, my second-born, my tasty own Jack?”

Jack Yap’s lips folded together so tightly the seams of
his scars closed, and Marm might never have cut the goat-gut stitches she had
sewn for all the sound he made. Marm smiled at him and shrugged.

“Well. My sight’s not what it used to see, there’s
that,” she said. “Pudding, love. Come up to bed. Your Marmy-Marm’ll give you
buttered toast and jam and snuggle you in tight.”

The chain on her shoulder clanked, but Pudding was
vastly and enormously and humongously hungry, so he heaved himself to his feet
and trotted inside the cottage after her. His wispy yellow hair was set briefly
aglow by the backlight in the cottage as he ducked his head to enter.

Jack Yap’s slender body twitched. His jaw hardened to
honed edges. He gazed towards the dark hills and thought of running, just him
and his egg. Escape. But the next moment he heard Pudding singing the egg song
softly to himself, in words only Jack could understand, and Jack just barely,
and as much as he longed to let the wilderness devour all sign of him, Jack Yap
lingered. The egg glimmered in its stone cradle like faerie treasure, and Jack
Yap could not help but peer inside. With a shuddering flash, the shell
vitrified, and like clearest glass or crystal showed (as through a window), the
infant within, asleep, scaled and tailed and horned in dragon-form, snoring thin
blue flames. Then the shell grew white as bone again.

“Well, I’ll think far on it, my Tam,” he told the little
changeling girl. “Dream soft and worry not. Jack’s brain is a-muttering
tonight.”

But Marm’s shadow fell over Jack Yap and the boot.
Inside that darkness, the egg blazed up like the birth of a rainbow.

“Very pretty, Jackie,” said his Marm.

And she hit him over the head with the coal scuttle.

#

Jack Yap bleared awake to the sound of the cottage
falling down around his ears.

With not quite his normal nimbleness, but with
considerable presence of mind for one who had been brained, he dragged himself
to the far side of the chicken coop and took cover. There was a terrible
groaning of beams bending, stone cracking, chains snapping, wattle pulling free
from daub and patches of thatch thumping to the floor. In the midst of it all
was a sound Jack Yap knew well, though he’d never heard it quite at that
decibel before.

“MURRRRRRR!”

Jack Yap began to laugh.

Pudding, it seemed, did not like being chained to his
bed much past that special morning time reserved for his sprinkle and splat out
there in the chicken yard. And since Marm was gone and Jack Yap had been
dead–or as near to dead as the coalscuttle could render him–to the
world, it fell to Pudding to leave his prison bed by whatever means he could.
No matter what walls stood in his way.

#

There was a man at market who knew the price of eggs.
That did not mean he was not a lie and cheat and miserable old beggar; in fact,
he had once tried to sell Jack Yap five beans in exchange for Marm’s brown cow.
Jack Yap had kicked the old man in his wooden leg repeatedly until he offered
good coin, and after that they had gone on as tolerable friends. Jack Yap and
Pudding went to him first, for so would Marm have done with the skinchanger’s
egg.

“Ah! It is the crafty young fellow with the spicular
feet!” exclaimed the old man. “In answer to your question–yes, indeed,
young master, yes indeed! At dawn today there was a matronly woman graced my
booth, whose vulpine locks and butcher’s grin indicated a close consanguineous
relationship with your diminutive and lethal lordship. What relation she bore
to that huge monster yonder is any man’s guess, for surely such a tiny body as
hers would have split in twain bringing that bulk into the world.”

The old man’s white-whiskery nod indicated Pudding, who
was shambling about the marketplace, accepting free bread and mead from vendors
too terrified to let him come under their stalls.

“Old man,” Jack Yap leaned into the counter on the
sharps of his elbows, “you talk like a twat, toothless though you are, but I
like you, so I won’t kick you dead just yet. Did Marm have my egg on her?”

The old man scratched his chin. The sound of it was like
chicken claws on wire mesh, and dried skin fell in fine snowflakes to his
grizzled chest.

“That she did, that she did,” he admitted. “Your
admirable progenitress and the virile young man with her, whose mammoth
musculature connoted daily labor in some geologic field, such as the quarries
of our craggy wilderness, had with them an ovoid object most rare and costly,
the monetary worth of which your lady mother most fervently desired me to
evaluate.”

“What did you tell her?” Jack Yap grabbed the old man by
his ratty collar and shook him the same way he had shaken a thousand eggs dead.
He shook him until he could hear the old man’s dry old brains rattling around
in his head, until the old heartbeat stuttered and clacked like a sack full of
bones and the web-work of his skin turned gray and blue.

“Gold!” choked the old man. “That egg’s worth gold and
jewels and gems and half the king’s realm, plus his son’s hand in marriage and
his daughter’s first born child!”

Jack Yap released him. Not gently. The old man collapsed
where he stood and died not half a day later, but by then Jack Yap and his
brother were far from that place.

“PUDDING!” he roared. “Pudding man! I need you!”

Pudding, as has been noted, had great big legs that had
not as yet come to the end of their growing. He swiped a fourth loaf of black
bread and a flagon full of mead and meandered back towards the origin of his
brother’s urgent voice. His stone-clamped feet wanted but a step or three to
overtake Jack, who had bounded out of the old man’s stall in search of him.
Jack Yap glared up at Pudding with red fire in his long, cruel eyes and his
scarred, cunning mouth began to smile. Pudding recognized this particular smile
as a creature-killing smile. He began to chortle and chuckle wetly with
pleasure. Jack Yap took him by the hand.

“Put me on your shoulders, Puds! There’s a few folks
down this road want stomping, and I know just the two young boys to do it, says
I.”

#

Marm and the mason sat on the mason’s large mattress and
stared at the egg. The changeling babe had been taunting them all morning with
brief glimpses of her beauty–now a black colt, now a firebird, now a
pearl of a girl–but for hours since lunch the egg had prove impenetrable.
Nor the heat of the hearth nor the freeze of the cellar could make glass of the
stone. Neither flat-bladed chisel nor tooth chisel broke the shell, nor hammer
and tongs, nor did dashing it against the wall prove method of entrance. Marm
and the mason were quite flummoxed.

“It won’t be worth much if it keeps looking like a
lump!” Marm cried. “The old man said a changeling slave girl would sell to a
higher bid than the king’s own daughter–and the princess is half witch
herself!”